The present invention relates generally to an electrical slip ring, and more particularly to an apparatus having a plurality of conductive plates and conductive fiber brush bundles to transfer electrical signal(s) between relatively rotatable objects.
It is well known that electrical slip rings are electromechanical devices that consist of rotational (rotors) and stationary (stators) members. They allow the transmission of electrical signals and power from their rotors to stators or vise verse.
A conventional electrical slip ring consists of conductive rings mounted on a rotor and insulated from it. Fixed brushes run in contact with the rings, rubbing against the peripheral surfaces of the rings, transferring electrical power or signals to the stator.
Electrical rotary joints, or electrical slip rings are electromechanical devices that consist of rotational and stationary members. They allow the transmission of electrical signals and power from their rotors to stators or vise verse. A conventional electrical slip ring consists of conductive rings mounted on a rotational member, insulated from it, and commuters fixed with a stationary member. Fixed brushes from commuters run in contact with the rings, rubbing against the peripheral surfaces of the rings, transferring electrical power or signals between rotational member and stationary member.
In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is a term describing various technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second (1,000,000,000 bits per second), as defined by the IEEE 802.3-2008 standard. 1000BASE-T (also known as IEEE 802.3ab) is a standard for Gigabit Ethernet over copper wiring. Each 1000BASE-T network segment can be a maximum length of 100 meters (330 feet), and must use Category 5 cable or better (including Cat 5e and Cat 6).
Category 5 cable (cat 5) is a twisted pair cable for carrying signals. This type of cable is used in structured cabling for computer networks such as Ethernet. To support Gigabit Ethernet, a higher performance version of cat 5, enhanced cat 5 or cat 5e has been added to the standards. Cat 5e adds new performance requirements to permit higher speed network operation. The category 5e specification improves upon the category 5 specification by tightening some crosstalk specifications and introducing new crosstalk specifications that were not present in the original category 5 specification. The bandwidth of category 5 and 5e is the same—100 MHz.
Slip rings do a great job of transmitting electrical power. However, when used for data communications, high speed data stream as a series of multiple frequency pulses being transferred through the slip ring with unequal path lengths, would change the signal impedance beyond that tolerated by the data signal and can cause phase shift and distortion of the transition points resulting in the received data rise and fall times to have serious edge jitter, or serious amplitude distortions. The resultant distorted data waveforms stress the decision-making hardware to correctly detect the data versus the fixed frequency of the data clock. When this becomes large enough, data errors occur.
This process can occur within the frequency response bandwidth of the device.